By David French, NATIONAL REVIEW
When political realities and national-security imperatives are at odds, political realities often win.
It appears the Trump administration is on the verge of an “agreement” with the Taliban that could represent the beginning of the end of America’s ground-troop presence in Afghanistan. Note well that I did not use the phrase that many in the media are using. I did not say that this agreement would “end America’s longest running war,” because it almost certainly will not. Instead, it will mark an American retreat in a war that will rage on for the foreseeable future, regardless of our wishful thinking.
America’s dilemma is simple: It’s facing a relentless political reality that is increasingly incompatible with its national-security needs. The American people want to end our long-standing wars and bring our troops home. But when and if we do retreat, our enemies rush to fill the vacuum, gaining prestige and restoring their strength.
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By Bob Fredericks and Yaron Steinbuch, NY POST
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson.Reuters
UK prime minister Boris Johnson suffered a major Brexit blow Tuesday — losing his majority in the House of Commons and then a vote in Parliament that threatens his vow to leave the European Union next month.
The dramatic day set the stage for a showdown Wednesday — when a cross-party alliance will try to prevent Johnson from taking Britain out of the EU without a deal on Oct. 31, and the PM will push for an early election.
Tuesday began with Johnson’s government losing its Commons majority when one of his own Conservative pols, Phillip Lee, defected to the pro-EU Liberal Democrats.
Tibi said his demands include a development plan for the Arab sector that would cost 64 billion shekels over 10 years or 32 billion over five years.
The Joint List will not enable Blue and White leader Benny Gantz to build a government without accepting the Arab sector’s demands, Joint List MKs Ahmad Tibi and Yousef Jabareen said at a news conference for English media on Tuesday.
Tibi said that just like parties issue demands for entering a governing coalition, there is a price for enabling a blocking majority in what he called “a preventative faction” from outside the government, which is a more realistic scenario.
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T. Belman. I wrote on the subject, Trump calls Muslim migration “the all-time biggest Trojan Horse”
Exposing ugly truths that have long been suppressed in the West.
At the height of Western dominance over Islam in the early twentieth century, the European historian Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) made a remarkably prescient observation that may have seemed exaggerated at the time:
Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past (from Belloc’s The Great Heresies, 1938, emphasis added).
Anyone who doubts that Islam has been “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had,” should familiarize themselves with Islam’s long offensive record vis-à-vis the West. A succinct summary follows:
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By Christopher Ruddy , NEWSMAX
The pollsters are manipulating President Donald Trump’s approval numbers and I can prove it.
Let me walk you through the facts.
Just last week Reuters/Ipsos released a poll showing the President with a job approval of just 42%.
At first glance, this is not a bad number considering the media’s all-out attack on the president, a negative press barrage unprecedented in U.S. history.
But the numbers are much better than Reuters claims.
I sifted through the polls raw data and polling “methodology.”
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HARARE, Zimbabwe —[..]
Internet shutdowns have become one of the defining tools of government repression in the 21st century — not just in Zimbabwe, but in a growing number of countries, mainly in Asia and Africa, that are seeking to quash dissent.
The shutdowns do more than stunt the democratic process. They can batter whole economies and individual businesses, as well as drastically disrupt the daily life of ordinary citizens, turning the search for mobile service into a game of cat and mouse with the police and driving people across borders just to send emails for work.
The Indian government employs the practice more frequently than any other, most recently in Kashmir, but it is not alone: In 2018, there were at least 196 shutdowns in 25 countries, up from 75 in 24 countries in 2016, according to research by Access Now, an independent watchdog group that campaigns for internet rights. In the first half of this year alone, there were 114 shutdowns in 23 countries.
By David E. Sanger, Steven Erlanger and Adam Nossiter, NYT
Iranian Presidential Office
A senior Iranian delegation arrived in Paris on Monday to work out the details of a financial bailout package that France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, intends to use to compensate Iran for oil sales lost to American sanctions. In return for the money, Iran would agree to return to compliance with a 2015 nuclear accord.
Iranian press reports and a senior American official say that the core of the package is a $15 billion letter of credit that would allow Iran to receive hard currency, at a time when most of the cash it makes from selling oil is frozen in banks around the world. That would account for about half the revenue Iran normally would expect to earn from oil exports in a year.
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Subdued crude sales are stunting Saudi growth, threatening the kingdom’s foreign investment push and investor interest in an Aramco IPO
By Rory Jones in Dubai andDavid Hodari in London, WSJ
A sluggish Saudi economy could suppress the appetite among foreign investors for plowing money into projects envisioned by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left. Photo: Yuri Kadobnov/Pool/Reuters
Saudi officials have pulled back oil production to less than 10 million barrels a day in an attempt to push crude prices to $80 a barrel. But global trade tensions and burgeoning U.S. production have offset their actions, keeping prices closer to $60 a barrel.
Economists have notched down estimates for economic growth this year for the world’s biggest exporter of petroleum. A median forecast of 10 economists predicts Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product will grow 1.4% this year, down from an estimate of 2.2% at the end of last year, according to FactSet. The International Monetary Fund is slightly more bullish: In July it said economic output would grow 1.9%.
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Appellate judges in the Hague reject Fatou Bensouda’s decision to close case into IDF’s 2010 takeover of Mavi Marmara, in which 10 violent pro-Hamas activists were killed
By MIKE CORDER
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Appeals judges on Monday ordered the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to reconsider again her refusal to open a formal investigation into the 2010 storming by Israeli forces of a blockade-busting flotilla heading to the Gaza strip.
Presiding Judge Solomy Bossa ordered prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to decide by December 2 whether or not to open a formal probe. The 3-2 majority ruling by the court’s appeals chamber is the latest step in a long legal battle to bring the case before the court.
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by
I recently came across an article on the always-fascinating topic of “The Real Reason the Left Hates Israel,” by Sharon Goldman. I highly recommend it for its analysis of the intellectual and political origins of the flaming misoziony* of the Global Progressive Left (GPL), although, as we will see, it completely misses the point.
Goldman explains how the popularity of the postmodernism of Derrida and Foucault made it difficult to challenge political narratives on the basis of factual truth. The Jews may say they are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Land of Israel, but the Palestinian Arabs claim a history of thousands of years in “Palestine,” descending from Canaanites or Philistines or whatever. Before postmodernism, you could point to archaeological and historical evidence to decide which narrative was closer to the truth; but the postmodernists “showed” that science and scholarship are nothing more than “constructions” used by the power structure to control the populations that it oppresses. The only objective reality is the reality of power and resistance.
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By Rabbi Benjamin Blech, AISH Aug 27, 2019
Whoever had any part in producing the new HBO 10 part series teasingly titled “Our Boys” should be profoundly ashamed – and whoever is misled into believing that they will have an opportunity to see a fair re-creation of the events in 2014 that began with the kidnapping and murders of three Israeli teenagers leading up to the Gaza war of that horrible summer deserves a fair warning: This is perhaps one of the most outrageous and deceitful distortions of a historically significant moment in the story of Israel’s struggle with barbaric acts of terrorism.
The way the story played out in fact begins with three 16-year-old religious Israelis, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, (full disclosure: Naftali was my cousin) deciding to hitchhike at Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion.
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By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,274,
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: While Israeli Jews continue to move into urban centers, the Palestinians have been assuming sovereignty in the open lands and leaving the Jews with personal sovereignty solely in their areas of residence. This trend is not restricted to the West Bank. It is also occurring in the Negev, the Galilee, and the Jezreel Valley, where Jews are moving into high-rise buildings while non-Jews are taking control of the open spaces. A contributing factor to this dangerous trend is the complete lack of interest in the subject displayed by most of the Israeli public.
Over the past decade, 28,650 illegal Arab structures have been built in Area C. Hundreds of kilometers of roads have been laid, and hundreds of thousands of agricultural dunams have been taken over in land that has never belonged to a Palestinian.
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,275, September 2, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Ever since a decision in January 2012, the EU has been expressly committed to the expansion of illegal Palestinian settlement in Area C in conjunction with the PA. This is in blatant disregard of the Oslo accords, which the EU purports to uphold. The object is to create continuous Palestinian settlement throughout the West Bank and thereby isolate and strangle Israeli communities.
For the first time in the 100-year-old conflict between the Zionist movement (and later the State of Israel) and the Palestinian Arabs, the Palestinians are surpassing the Jews in strategic settlement, over which the Zionist movement had enjoyed a monopoly. The PA is achieving this under the auspices of the EU.
American Jews should acknowledge that they are mired in an existential crisis that is largely self-inflicted.
When Israeli Minister of Education Rabbi Rafi Peretz recently likened intermarriage in the US to a second Holocaust, he was roundly criticized by liberal Jews, including the ADL and representatives of the Conservative movement. Some claimed his remark was contemptible or somehow constituted “Holocaust denial.” But despite the outrage and continuing controversy over his stark analogy, liberal and non-Orthodox organizations may really have been angered by the implicit indictment of their apparent inability to ensure Jewish continuity among their followers. Their indignation was incongruous, moreover, considering how often progressives misapply Holocaust imagery to the US southern border crisis or falsely compare the Trump administration to Nazi Germany.
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By Victor Sharpe, RENEW AMERICA
“Even if Israel shrank to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not truly recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony.”
“Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps never before, to seek global domination. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not man-made global warming.”
“What we have witnessed for far too long are Israeli and some world leaders constantly making endless concessions to the deceitful leaders of the terrorist crime family known as the Palestinian Authority.”
“Wherever the Muslim foot has once trod triumphal, that territory is forever regarded by them as Islamic. If such territory is lost to Muslims, then Allah has been diminished and the land must be retaken, however long it takes. Peace, then, is merely a mirage in the desert sands.”
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Satirical, of course.
By Valerie Sobel
Tie following is an instructional guide for liberal American Jewry on how to pick the perfect President in 2020:
1. Select from a field of Democratic candidates only. This ensures your toothless grandma’s ideas about the world will shape your children’s future and provide you with a sense of compassion for all ethnic & minority causes. Your shtetl-raised aunt Esther and her Mahjong ladies will be proud you’re still voting for their beloved Kennedys.
2. Appearances are everything. Check that the candidate appears presidential. Specifically, he/she should look good and be duly approved by the groupthink masses. Being aided, abetted and financially supported by the mainstream media is paramount. He/she should sound polished and scripted, be politically correct, and above all – make consistent use of the tele-prompter.
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BY
Under-reporting by the New York Times on Nazi antisemitism, and the deliberate placement of such abridged stories deep inside the paper, had terrible consequences for the Jews of Europe. First, American Jews who relied on the Times for their information, in that pre-television era, had no clear idea of the extent of the antisemitic horrors being perpetrated, and how, as the Nazi war machine extended German rule over much of Europe, Jews trapped in those occupied lands were being systematically slaughtered – gassed in camps or mobile vans, shot, burned alive, worked deliberately to death — in the Endlosung, or Final Solution to the “Jewish problem.” Had they been better informed, and in a timelier fashion, American Jews — properly alarmed — would have made much greater efforts to rescue their relatives, and other Jews, too. They would have sent money, and money given to bribe the right rat in the right office might mean that life-saving visas could be acquired, both for exit and entrance. That money could also pay for transportation out of Nazi-occupied Europe, and for the services of passeurs who could smuggle Jews into such safe havens as Switzerland or Spain or Turkey. Such sums from America could prove useful for desperate Jews, too, in other ways — to pay for lodging, food, and transport – if they were on the run. Read more…
T. BELMAN. HAARETZ DOESN’T TAKE THE TROUBLE TO ADVISE THAT TO DO SO, THE PA WOULD BE VIOLATING A FOUNDATIONAL AGREEMENT WITH ISRAEL. THIS THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO DO AND SUCH A MOVE WOULD BE ILLEGAL.
The accords, signed in 1993 and in 1995, divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C ? It remains unclear what steps Palestinians will take to implement this decision
AFP
The Palestinian Authority announced over the weekend that it has decided to cancel the division of the West Bank into Area A, B and C according to the Oslo Accords the Palestinian Liberation Organization had signed with Israel in 1993 and 1995.
From now on, the PA will treat all West Bank territories as Palestinian territories under its sovereignty. It remains unclear what practical steps will be taken in light of this decision, and whether the PA will actually implement this move.
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